Sustainability Communication in Higher Education Institutions: Scale Development and Validation Study

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This article aims to develop and validate the Sustainability Communication Scale in higher education institutions. An eight-step process proposed by DeVellis (2022) was applied to develop the scale, which consists of 32 items capable of measuring the level of sustainability communication in Turkish universities. A total of 1291 participants, comprising 109 academics and 1182 students, participated in the study. Expert opinion analysis, KMO and Barlett tests, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, Cronbach's alpha, composite reliability, and partial correlation analyses were all used to check the scale's validity and reliability. According to the results of the exploratory factor analysis using the principal components method, the scale consists of 4 factors: environmental sustainability communication, social sustainability communication, economic sustainability communication, and sustainability of communication. The general structure and measurement of the scale have been validated by confirmatory factor analysis. The internal consistency coefficient found using Cronbach's alpha was .769; internal consistency coefficients found using composite reliability were .875(F1), .888 (F2), .866(F3), .882(F4). The findings indicate that the scale is a valid and reliable measurement tool.